COPELAND council has written off debts of more than one million pounds since 2015, with the crisis blamed on previous administrations.

Mayor Mike Starkie, who was elected in 2015, has presented evidence that most of the bad debt pre-dates his tenure in the top job.

Responding to a question raised by councillor Raymond Gill at full council, he has written to members setting out inherited problems, including a year by year break down of the figures. Since 2015, the council has written off more than £350,000 in business rates, £188,000 in council tax and £488,000 of disabled facility loans.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service previously revealed that the facility loans had to be written off because there was no paper trail for the debt.

Mr Starkie said: “We will never get in a situation where writing off money is reduced to nil as individuals and businesses do fall on hard times, but we can and do manage recovering as much of the money owed to us as possible. Our staff have helped put us in a position that for the fourth year running we will be delivering a budget of no cuts to the services we provide, below inflation council tax rises and a freeze on parking charges among many other initiatives. The positive progress we have made as an organisation shone out of the recent Local Government Association Peer Group Report that recognised not only how far we have moved on but how positively we are viewed by others.”

Councillor Gill said the purpose of his question had been to bring to the mayor’s attention that writing off a certain amount of bad debt was “normal practice”. within local government and it had also happened on the mayor’s watch.

Business rates write off: Of the £355,513.54, just £6,628 of the losses date from his time on office. Of the remaining bad debt of £348,885.44, £329,913.06 was accrued during the accounting period 2011 to 2015. The remaining balance goes back as far as 2004/05. This unrecoverable debt was written off in the 2016 balance sheet. as part of his review of council finances.

Council tax write-off: Since the mayor took over, the council has also written off £187,843 in council tax but of that figure £49,384 is attributable to the period 2015 to date. The bulk of the write-off of £78,308 was for the accounting period 2011 to 2015. The remaining balance of write off £59,701.58 goes back as far as 1993/94.